


Ruddy Red

by h0ldthiscat



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 00:16:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5436110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/h0ldthiscat/pseuds/h0ldthiscat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Come here,” he says, still using his soft voice, and Scully starts the dryer, and follows him to the back of the laundromat and into the one unisex bathroom with a flickering white bulb affixed to the ceiling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ruddy Red

“Goddammit.” Her voice carries over the low thrum of the dozens of washing machines and dryers around them and he looks up from his reading, a battered copy of last week’s _People._

“Shit!” Her back is to him as she stands over a washer.

Her language catches his attention. “Everything okay?”

“This shirt is ruined,” she says, angrily working a red t-shirt in her hand. Her voice is thready but direct, a tone she used to reserve for incompetent local law enforcement, in their old life. 

“I’m sorry,” he offers. 

“I want to do my own fucking laundry in my own fucking washer,” she hisses, throwing the handfuls of wet clothes into the dryer with more force than necessary.

They don’t talk about how it used to be or how it is now. Maybe one day they will, after they’ve stopped running, once they find a house somewhere with a lot of fresh air and a wooden fence. Maybe he will have to build it. Maybe he won’t mind. 

He stands, feet scuffing across the cheap linoleum to her. “Scully?”

“What?” She finally turns to look at him, and her eyes are a dark, angry blue, like the ocean before a hurricane. “What, Mulder?”

“Is there anything I can--”

“You can go buy me another shirt, because now I only have eleven, and that’ll change our washing schedule. I can get by doing laundry every two weeks with twelve shirts, but not eleven.”

“Hey,” he says quietly, knowing better than to touch her right now. 

“Don’t use soft voice,” she sighs, shutting the lid on the dryer and inserting the quarters. “You don’t get to use soft voice right now.”

He sticks out his bottom lip in an exaggerated pout. “But you love soft voice.”

“Mulder, now is not the--”

“You love when I use soft voice in bed,” he reminds her, pitching his tone even lower now. From his position behind her he can almost see the hair on the back of her neck standing up in uncontrollable arousal. 

“Mulder.” She turns her head profile, and he can see the smirk trying to hide at the corner of her mouth. “We’re in public.”

“That didn’t stop us in Salina,” he practically purrs, and remembers the way her eyes glinted when he’d moved to close the curtains in their dingy hotel room and she’d stopped him.

“Salina was different, Mulder,” she says, although the dreamlike quality of her voice betrays her protestation. “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

He grins, still not touching her, though his hands ache to run up and down the length of her lithe, strong body. She runs whenever she can, whenever it’s safe, and she comes back to the motel rooms with sweat sticky on her upper lip, her collarbones, her hairline. Barely noticeable, a bead of sweat forms at her temple now, in the laundromat buzzing with forced hot air and the sad, uncomfortable heat of transience, of the blur of motels and gas station hot dogs and everything their life has become in the last year. 

“Come here,” he says, still using his soft voice, and Scully starts the dryer, and follows him to the back of the laundromat and into the one unisex bathroom with a flickering white bulb affixed to the ceiling. 

She locks the door behind them and he pins her to it, kissing her slowly, hands on either side of her head to begin, letting her be the first to make contact, like he’d done all those years ago the first time they shut down the X Files. She reaches out, finally, one hand cupping his jaw, rough with stubble, the other grabbing a fistful of his gray Canyon de Chelly t-shirt. 

He reaches out then, anchoring his hands at her waist, pushing her white tee out of the way and slipping his hands below the waistband of her exercise shorts. It’s laundry day. She rolls his bottom lip between her teeth and he moves his hand lower into her underwear. 

“Ah!” She yelps against his mouth, and lets her head drop to his shoulder. 

He speeds up his movements, his fingers slick with her, all her, everywhere. He drops to his knees and pulls her shorts and underwear down around her ankles. She bends her leg and drapes it over his shoulder, the heel of her dirty white sneaker digging into his back. His mouth is at her center, hot and insistent and worshipful. 

She makes sounds that aren’t words and grips his hair tightly, raising her hips to meet his mouth. She tastes sweet and sad and hot, and he slips two fingers inside of her. Her thighs clench around his head and her femoral pulse flutters against his cheek.

“Shit!”

He glances up and her cheeks are ruddy red, the color her hair used to be before they bleached it one night in a gas station bathroom in Arkansas. She’d cried, insisted it had been from the smell and the burning because they’d left it on a tad too long. The small patch of hair at her center reminds him of who she truly is, who she’ll get to be again when this mess is all over. 

She yelps above him as he curls his fingers forward inside her, and then she comes softly, expelling a long puff of air followed by a gentle chuckle. She feathers her fingers through his hair and says, “Thank you.” She sniffs, pulls her shorts back up, gives him a quick sloppy kiss. 

“It’s the least I can do.” He shrugs, stands.

She grips his hand firmly and squeezes. Her eyes are a big wet lagoon. “Mulder. Thank you.”

His chest is tight and his voice is hoarse. “It’s the least I can do,” he says.


End file.
